How did you get your name? Pt. 2

Growing up, my mother called me Rosie in public, at home she would also call me, Mejita or Cositas, all terms of endearments.  I grew up in a working class Hispanic family with a single mother and a grandmother.  My father was never in the picture when I was growing up.  I would see him when he came by to visit with my mother every once in a while.  He never came inside the house.  I was told later by my mother that it was a sign of respect to my grandmother, not to step in the house.  Even after my grandmother died years later, he would never step inside the house, just stand outside in the porch. 

The nicknames “Mejita” which means “little daughter” and “Cositas” which means “little things” in Spanish, were endearments that my mother used all the time.  They were nicknames that were commonly used within any Hispanic household.  My extended family also called me Rosie until I put a stop to it shortly after high school.  It took a little longer to get my Mother and my Grandmother to stop calling me Rosie and start calling me Rose.  Eventually they acquiesced.   Many of my cousins still call me Rosie when they see me and I gently remind them that I would prefer to be called Rose.

When I first started working on our family tree, I reviewed my birth certificate and realized that my middle name on the certificate was “Lara” and not “Marie”, as it is now.  I asked my mother why she had not put “Marie” as the middle name on the birth certificate.  My mother told me that at the time, she used her last name as my middle name by default.  It wasn’t until after I was baptized at Our Lady of the Assumption Catholic Church in Ventura, California, that my mother replaced “Lara” with “Marie”.  When I attended Kindergarten in Saticoy, California, I remember using my full name for the first time, Rose Marie Gonzales.

 

 

MyGenShare.com Website

I found this website through an article in the Deseret News by Barry J. Ewell called “Genealogy:  150 Questions to ask Family Members about their Lives.”  Published online on Tuesday, Feb. 11, 2014, 8:00 a.m. MST.   It is a great article.  Mr. Ewell is author of "Family Treasures: 15 Lessons, Tips and Tricks for Discovering your Family History," on Facebook and founder of MyGenShare.com, an educational website for genealogy and family history.  

 Southern California Genealogy Society Jamboree

Teach Me Genealogy: "To forget one's ancestors is to be a brook without a source, a tree without a root." --Chinese proverb